How Do You Nurture a Learning Tech Community of 1000 Colleagues in 7 Countries?

When the pandemic hit, we were planning our yearly tech conference to be in Riga with people coming together and learning from each other and from external experts. But as last year did not pan out as planned for most of us, we had to change that into something else.

Having a strong culture across several countries we wanted to create an outlet for the knowledge that we sat on and create even stronger bonds across units. Therefore, we created #IfTech21 a bi/tri-weekly online event where we invite every tech colleague of ours to join the sessions. They are of course recorded for those who miss out — as finding a calendar opening for 1000 people is quite hard😉. The events consist of different tech topics, such as Authentication, API, Blazor, Kubernetes, Azure Event Grid and Graph databases.

Doing this as a cross country team

To pull this off, the group hosting these events are a mix of people from all over the organization, with different perspectives and seniority. All adding to the quality of the events, with developers’ eyes on the content — as this is by developers, for developers.

Inclusion being a success key and a fun way to get to know each other

Inclusion is one of the keys to making the events for everyone to take part in. We might be far away from each other but doing things together and creating conversations among colleagues is vital to keep the culture working in the way we hope it should during the pandemic. To make the colleagues feel included we have been using the Swedish start-up tool, Mentimeter, to make the sessions a bit more fun and interactive. Asking questions such as:

How have we done so far?

We have become the most followed streaming channel among all in If, hopefully, by creating good and relevant content. As we have had between 200–400 listeners live each time and with approx. 50–100 people watching the sessions afterwards. “This is what I call a learning culture” — Nicolas Blystad Carbone says, one of the developers involved in the project.

The perk of being a big .NET employer — having celebrity guests live from the USA

Before summer we were also happy to have the Director of Program Management @ Microsoft on .NET, Java and the Visual Studio family, Scott Hunter live from the USA. Where he showed some of the latest features coming soon and had a Q&A with our colleagues. It was immensely popular among our colleagues.

Remember to fill up on the things that make you happy!

Now starting up again and fall is soon here, we kindly remind you to ensure that you add to your life the things that bring you in a good mood. Here are some tips from our previous events, might there be something fun for you to try out